Welcoming Prof. David Rubinsztein to TAU's Faculty of Medical and Health Sciences

We are proud to welcome Prof. David Rubinsztein as an affiliated faculty member at the Faculty of Medical and Health Sciences Tel Aviv University

Prof. Rubinsztein is a leader in the field of autophagy, particularly in the context of neurodegenerative diseases. His laboratory discovered that this pathway plays an important role in degrading many of the intracytoplasmic, aggregate-prone, proteins causing neurodegenerative diseases, like Huntington’s disease, Parkinson’s disease and various dementias. He pioneered the strategy of autophagy upregulation as a possible therapeutic approach in various neurodegenerative diseases and identified drugs and novel pathways that may be exploited for this objective. He has made key contributions to illuminating the relevance of autophagy defects as a disease mechanism and to the basic cell biology of this important catabolic process.

Prof. Rubinsztein is Professor of Molecular Neurogenetics (University of Cambridge, personal chair (2005)), a UK Dementia Research Institute Group leader and is currently deputy director of the Cambridge Institute for Medical Research. He was elected Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences (2004), EMBO member (2011), Fellow of the Royal Society (2017) and member of Academia Europaea (2022). He was awarded the Graham Bull Prize (2007), Thudichum Medal (2017), Roger de Spoelberch prize (2017), the Goudie Medal (2020) and The Movement Disorders Research Award from American Academy of Neurology (2024). One of our faculty members, Dr. Avraham Ashkenazi, performed a post-doc in Rubinsztein’s lab. A current PhD student at the School of Medicine will be going to Rubinsztein’s lab for a post-doc with a prestigious EMBO fellowship.